An electronic tutor for structural distillation

Abstract

For a variety of safety and economic reasons, novice designers in Australian universities have experienced diminishing access to examples of the real artifacts that are the subject of their design tasks. Consequently, their understanding of the theories and analytical tools for design analysis have become abstract, with their studies becoming more disassociated from reality, leading to reduced motivation. In an attempt to bridge the gap between abstract theories and their practical embodiments, the authors have created a software tutor that contains both photographic images of real machinery, and sets of modeling 'tools'. Consequently, academics responsible for teaching the engineering scien..